Unsuitable Jobs for Unsuitable Girls

On my thirteenth birthday, a friend’s mother gave me a present which changed the way I thought about reading. It was books, four of them: Regency Buck and The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, and My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin.

My birthday fell at the very end of the school year, so I was set up for a glorious, revelatory summer holiday. I spent most of it with my nose in a book in my parents’ North Oxford garden. Georgette Heyer was everything I had thought Jane Austen would be when I had diligently ploughed through Pride and Prejudice at 12. (No one should be allowed to read Jane Austen before their sixteenth birthday, by the way – it ruins the story at a point when one isn’t nearly old enough to appreciate it. When I was 12 I didn’t think Austen put in nearly enough swooning. Nor did enough people raise that most glorious of Georgette Heyerisms, the cynical eyebrow.) In Elizabeth Bowen I discovered a world of austere, clipped glamour, where people wrote brittle love-letters and were astute and self-knowing. I wanted to be astute and self-knowing when I was 13, although I didn’t manage it very well. But My Brilliant Career was something else altogether. It made me laugh, it made me sad, and it made me furious, and until then I didn’t have any idea that a novel could make me feel so many different things all at once. It also made me want to be a writer, like its heroine. Then I found out that it had been written in 1895, by a 16-year-old girl living in the Australian outback. I was hooked on the romance of this most resolutely anti-romantic of books. My Brilliant Career purports to be the autobiography of Sybylla Melvyn, the tomboyish daughter of a down-on-his-luck dairy farmer and his ‘full-fledged aristocrat’ wife. Sybylla’s life on her family’s farm consists of a series of unremittingly dreary tasks, but she pines for art, books and music. Cultural luxuries are hard to come by in her drought-stricken home, but luckily she is rescued from her miserable existence by her well-to-do grandmother, who sweeps her off to live among civilized people at Caddagat, her mother’s ancestral home. It is there that Sybylla learns the art of flirtation and attracts the attentions of a local landowner, Harold Beecham. The ensuing romance is more Beatrice and Benedick than Romeo and Juliet, but it has a very surprising conclusion. It wouldn’t do, of course, to give the ending away, but every time I read My Brilliant Career, its dénouement makes me howl with rage. Once I’ve calmed down, I always realize that it provides the only possible ending. What raises Franklin’s novel above a run-of-the-mill romance is its extraordinary heroine. Sybylla is all too aware that her future will involve either marriage or penury, and she finds both options unattractive. She wants to be a writer but knows that opportunities for country girls on Australia’s literary stage are few and far between. Her witty, sparkling narrative frequently erupts into rage about the subjugation of women. Sybylla is proud to be Australian, ‘a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush’. She is thankful to be ‘a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and [to] earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do’. But she is completely and utterly furious that she is a woman. ‘Girls! girls!’ she proclaims. ‘Those of you who have hearts, and therefore a wish for happiness, homes, and husbands by and by, never develop a reputation of being clever. It will put you out of the matrimonial running as effectually as though it had been circulated that you had leprosy.’ There are other memorable things about My Brilliant Career. Sybylla’s drunken father (‘a slave of drink, careless, even dirty and bedraggled in his personal appearance’) is vividly realized, as is her uptight mother, who believes her rebellious daughter to be a ‘perfect she-devil’. The Caddagat letches and rakes who take liberties with Sybylla’s person are remorselessly dealt with, as are the society beauties who make her feel inferior. But for all her powers of portraiture, it is Franklin’s evocation of Australia itself which is her most remarkable triumph. The Australia she describes is hot, dirty, wild and godforsaken, and yet for Sybylla (and, by the end of her story, for her reader) it is also irresistible. My Brilliant Career is now rightly celebrated as an Australian classic. It was made into a successful film in 1979, and reissued by Virago in 1980. But shortly after its first appearance Miles Franklin withdrew it from publication, and it remained out of print until 1966, ten years after her death. Its first readers had been quick to identify heroine with authoress, and Franklin was horrified to find that she had inadvertently proclaimed to the world that her father was a drunk and her mother a shrew. In fact, we know now that the book was based largely on Franklin’s own experiences (after all she, like her heroine, was a 16-year-old girl from the outback), but that certainly wasn’t what her readers were supposed to think. Her family were so furious that Franklin left home to scratch a living in Sydney as a writer for Australia’s main national newspaper, The Bulletin. And it was there that she wrote her revenge – a novel which punished her naïve fans by turning the concept of autobiography itself on its head. This was My Career Goes Bung, another autobiography of Sybylla Melvyn. But any reader expecting a straightforward sequel to My Brilliant Career will be disappointed. In her second book, Franklin made Sybylla the daughter of loving parents, who realizes her literary ambitions by writing a highly romanticized version of her own life. This Sybylla spices up her book by inventing a love-interest, and by endowing her kind and morally upright parents with all manner of vices. When the book is published, problems ensue. Her extended family disown her, unsuitable young men besiege her with offers of marriage, and a local farmer and friend of her parents, Henry Beauchamp, assumes that the character of Harold Beecham (Sybylla’s first book is, of course, My Brilliant Career itself ) represents a codified declaration of love for him. In order to escape the unsuitable young men, and some even more unsuitable old ones, Sybylla is sent to Sydney, where she finds that she is a celebrity. She is taken up by a thinly disguised version of Rose Scott, a leading suffragist and doyenne of Sydney’s sole literary salon, and is semi-seduced by Goring Hardy, Australia’s ‘one great literary man’. (Hardy was probably based on Andrew Paterson, a well-known Australian poet and the author of the original ‘Waltzing Matilda’ lyrics, with whom Franklin had had a brief liaison during her time in Sydney.) My Career Goes Bung is a much angrier book than its predecessor. Its Sybylla is more demure and self-contained than her Brilliant Career counterpart, but she is also more focused on the specific iniquities of a literary world which will devour a book while attacking its author for being unladylike enough to write it in the first place. By its conclusion Sybylla has realized that she will never be able to fight the parochial petty-mindedness of her native land, and is preparing to leave Australia for London and its ‘romantic fogs, its crowds and ceremonial pageants’. In this, the conclusion of her novel anticipated Franklin’s own life. No Australian publisher would touch My Career Goes Bung, with its explicit narrative of Sybylla’s relationship with Goring Hardy, and its too thinly disguised portraits of real people. Franklin left Australia with the manuscript in her bag, and joined the American suffrage movement before moving to England. She did not return to Australia for almost thirty years, and My Career Goes Bung was not published until 1946. Over the course of a long career, Franklin published many other books, including semi-autobiographical accounts of Australian pioneer life, but she did so under a pseudonym. When My Career Goes Bung finally appeared it did so under Franklin’s own name, and was dedicated ‘to all Australian writers who were as young, who are as young, and who each decade for ever will be . . . as young as I was when first I foolhardily tried to write’. More than anything else, My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung are novels of youth, and, on rereading them, I’m not surprised that my 13-year-old self fell in love with Sybylla. She is a true heroine for anyone who has ever wanted to write.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Daisy Hay 2009